Rickey Laurentiis

press release:

Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. His poetry has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, he traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. He received his MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and his Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where he read literature and queer theory.

He is the author of Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery award, as well as named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. Individual poems have appeared widely, including  Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry; have been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, A Tale of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Prospect.3's art catalogue Notes for Now; as well as translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Laurentiis' interests include visual culture, ekphrasis, shade, revisionary logics, penetration and the body, radical justice, cultural studies and shame. He has taught at a selection of institutions, including Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the 92nd Street Y. He is the inaugural Fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh.

For more information, see http://www.rickeylaurentiis.com/about